Add manual keywords

The auto-discovery flow is great for finding keywords you haven't thought of. But sometimes you already have the list, from a strategy doc, a brief, or your own SEO tool.

How

Open Keywords and click + Add manual. Pick the site, paste your keywords into the text area (one per line, or separated by commas) and click Add keyword or Add N keywords. They land in the table with status Discovered.

Some rules:

• Each keyword must be 2 to 120 characters.
• Duplicates are dropped, case-insensitively, and phrases already in the library for that site and language are skipped. The confirmation tells you how many were added and how many were skipped.
• One paste can add up to 500 keywords.
• Owners, admins and editors can add keywords.

The keyword quota

Manual keywords count against your keyword quota the same way discovered ones do, but only when they are new to your account:

• A keyword already in your account (same text and language, on any of your sites, whatever its status, archived included) never uses quota again, also when you add it to another site. Text is compared ignoring case and extra spaces, and a language with a region counts as the language itself: pt-BR and pt are the same.
• A keyword you deleted is no longer in your account, so adding it back counts as new.
• When quota runs short, the keywords beyond what remains (monthly quota first, then any extra keywords you bought) are skipped with a message.

Adding keywords by hand never uses a keyword research run. See Plans and quotas for the quota of each plan.

What's different

• No volume, difficulty or opportunity score. We didn't research it for you, you brought it in. Rows without a score sort to the bottom of the table.
• Selectable for a batch like any other keyword: accept it and it is eligible for Plan this month. Because the plan picks accepted keywords by opportunity score, keywords without a score are taken last; set the per-site count high enough to include them.

Getting metrics on a manual keyword

Discovery skips phrases that are already in the library for that site and language, so a manual row is never enriched later. If you want numbers for a phrase, delete the row and run discovery with that phrase as the seed; the seed usually comes back as a candidate with its volume and difficulty, alongside related keywords. Once deleted, the phrase counts as a new keyword when discovery brings it back, unless it is still on another of your sites.

Bulk import

Pasting a list into + Add manual works on every plan: one keyword per line, commas work too, up to 500 per paste.

From the Growth plan and on lifetime tiers 3 and 4, Import CSV next to it takes a spreadsheet of up to 2,000 rows (1 MB). Download the template from the dialog: the only required column is keyword; language (one of en, it, es, de, fr, pt, nl, pl or ja; a code with a region such as pt-BR is read as pt; rows without it use the site's language), search_volume (a whole number), kd_score (0 to 100) and intent (informational, commercial, transactional or navigational) are optional and are shown in the table as if discovery had found them. Commas and semicolons both work as separators, duplicates inside the file and keywords already on that site are skipped, and lines with a bad value (an unsupported language, for example) are reported by line number without blocking the rest.

Imported keywords follow the same quota rules as manual ones: only keywords new to your account count, and rows beyond what remains of the quota are skipped with a message.